Introducing: ProQuest Statistical Abstracts of the World

If you were recently looking for an aggregated database of foreign national compendia, you probably couldn’t find one. Some libraries are nice enough to create lists that link out to the various sites, but no one has pulled this many compendia together in one searchable database… until now!

Building on the success of the much-beloved ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the U.S., ProQuest has now released ProQuest Statistical Abstracts of the World. This exciting new product applies the same logic and technology to a much larger and geographically wider collection.

The Statistical Abstracts of the World currently aggregates covers statistical abstracts from 31 countries and makes the content available through a single-search interface. By the end of this year, the collection will expand to 40 countries. In 2014, we plan to cover 50 countries.

These statistical abstracts are generally issued by the national statistical offices of foreign governments and contain country-level data not easily found elsewhere. Global and regional statistical compendia issued by international organizations and research firms will also be included. Additionally, statistical yearbooks from the United Nations and other international organizations are available.

Users need data they can work with. ProQuest knows this, and has had PDF versions of each statistical abstract’s and yearbook’s tables indexed, and converted into Excel spreadsheets. And foreign language abstracts - like those from Brazil, Chile and France - will have their Excel tables translated into English! This is valuable for those countries that have no English language compendia.

(Worth noting: This same look, feel and functionality will soon migrate to our flagship statistical product, ProQuest Statistical Insight. Statistical Insight customers will be able to get a quick view of relevant tables and apply facets at the table level. Look for that in early 2014.)